quotations The Best Ernest Hemingway Quotes

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A list of the best Ernest Hemingway quotes. This list is arranged by which famous Ernest Hemingway quotes have received the most votes, so only the greatest Ernest Hemingway quotes are at the top of the list. All the most popular quotes from Ernest Hemingway should be listed here, but if any were missed you can add more at the end of the list. This list includes notable Ernest Hemingway quotes on various subjects, many of which are inspirational and thought provoking.

This list answers the questions, "What are the best Ernest Hemingway quotes?" and "What is the most famous Ernest Hemingway quote?"

You can see what subjects these historic Ernest Hemingway quotes fall under displayed to the right of the quote. Be sure to vote so your favorite Ernest Hemingway saying won't fall to the bottom of the list.

1

76 6

Courage is grace under pressure.Ernest Hemingway

2

84 12

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places…Ernest Hemingway

3

45 5

I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.Ernest Hemingway

4

55 8

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.Ernest Hemingway

5

57 11

A man can be destroyed but not defeated.Ernest Hemingway

6

24 2

All things truly wicked start from an innocence.Ernest Hemingway

7

50 9

Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.Ernest Hemingway

8

31 4

It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the endErnest Hemingway

9

32 5

There is no friend as loyal as a bookErnest Hemingway

10

36 7

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are stronger at the broken places.Ernest Hemingway

11

36 7

The world is a fine place worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.Ernest Hemingway

12

20 2

Never mistake motion for action.Ernest Hemingway

13

32 6

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.Ernest Hemingway

14

27 4

As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.Ernest Hemingway

15

28 5

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.Ernest Hemingway

16

25 5

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.Ernest Hemingway

17

17 2

How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.Ernest Hemingway

18

19 3

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.Ernest Hemingway

19

16 2

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.Ernest Hemingway

20

18 3

This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don't want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. You lose the taste.Ernest Hemingway

21

18 4

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.Ernest Hemingway

22

14 2

It's enough for you to do it once for a few men to remember you. But if you do it year after year, then many people remember you and they tell it to their children, and their children and grandchildren remember and, if it concerns books, they can read them. And if it's good enough, it will last as long as there are human beings.Ernest Hemingway

23

6 0

In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet, but unused.Ernest Hemingway

24

14 4

The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do.Ernest Hemingway

25

12 3

But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.Ernest Hemingway

26

12 3

There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.Ernest Hemingway

27

9 1

Retirement is the ugliest word in the language.Ernest Hemingway

28

9 1

The only thing that could spoil a day was people. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.Ernest Hemingway

29

9 1

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.Ernest Hemingway

30

10 2

What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.Ernest Hemingway

31

10 2

There isn't any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.Ernest Hemingway

32

8 1

I know now that there is no one thing that is true -- it is all true.Ernest Hemingway

33

8 1

michaelj72 added Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.

34

9 2

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.Ernest Hemingway

35

11 4

Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.Ernest Hemingway

36

12 5

Don't you drink? I notice you speak slightingly of the bottle. I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure. When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky? When you are cold and wet what else can warm you? Before an attack who can say anything that gives you the momentary well-being that rum does? The only time it isn't good for you is when you write or when you fight. You have to do that cold. But it always helps my shooting. Modern life, too, is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief.Ernest Hemingway

37

17 10

Man is not made for defeat.Ernest Hemingway

38

7 1

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life --and one is as good as the other.Ernest Hemingway

39

8 2

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try…Ernest Hemingway

40

10 4

The age demanded that we dance and jammed us into iron pants. And in the end the age was handed the sort of shit that it demanded.Ernest Hemingway

41

5 0

To me heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on nine different floors.Ernest Hemingway

42

7 2

I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.Ernest Hemingway

43

7 2

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstacy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.Ernest Hemingway

44

6 1

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.Ernest Hemingway

45

7 3

That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.Ernest Hemingway

46

6 2

I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.Ernest Hemingway

47

4 0

I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.Ernest Hemingway

48

5 2

You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around caf?s.Ernest Hemingway

49

5 2

They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.Ernest Hemingway

50

4 1

You write a book like that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer.Ernest Hemingway

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